Making the most of 1024×768
I use a Thinkpad X60. I love the ultraportable form factor. I especially like it when I travel as the long battery and small size makes a light bag!
The down side to the X60 is the screen. I miss the screen real estate of my home desk monitor. I’ve been trying out various methods of making better use of my laptop’s 1024×768 screen. The latest two products are Deskloops and RocketDock.
Deskloops was pretty cool but I found I really wanted a couple of related windows to appear on the screen side-by-side. Unfortunately, Deskloops really wants to make the active window move to the center of the screen. I wanted it to move to the left edge of the screen. Most often, I wanted my email client on the left and have enough space for my buddy list on the right. It was nearly impossible to get this behavior. I finally started hunting for an alternative.
RocketDock takes its lead from Mac OS X. By default it places a “dock” at the top of the screen and gives it dynamic behavior. While I liked it, it did not fit my very cluttered desktop. So, I first moved the dock to the right edge and then made it auto-hide. I liked it - but - what I now had was really no better / difference from having Windows XP’s an auto-hide task bar at the bottom.
So, I’ve cleaned up my desktop and placing the dock back at the top and disabling autohide. I suspect it will last about 2 more days and then I’ll uninstall it too.
